Is Your Business Without Direction?

Forming and building a business from the ground up is far from an easy task. Reaching the necessary scope of potential clients and proving why your business is better than a competitor’s is another difficult task entirely. True, we all start with a mission, an idea, a concept of how we can change some aspect of society’s common everyday lifestyle, whether it be digitally, socially, or with physical products to sell.

Yet often after taking the first steps in developing our business, we may find ourselves lost and without direction, not knowing why business hasn’t been going the way we hoped or confused as to what the next steps should be.

An infographic by i-nexus Strategy Execution Software introduces the concept of Hoshin Kanri, a Japanese term regarding the ideas of a compass and its management, in other words managing ones direction, used by many business owners to establish the wisest and best next step in the process of business.

Select, Develop and Deploy Objectives

The main core of this six-step Hoshin Kanri process (processes 2, 3 and 4) revolve around the idea of objectives: their selection, development, and deployment.

To begin with, each business should have a few high-reaching goals to aim for in the long-term, yet it’s important to note that while these goals should be difficult and complex to attain, they must remain realistic, plausible and possible. From the third step onwards, the Hoshin Kanri process introduces a yearly time frame in which yearly objectives are set and worked towards, executing activities that help your business reach those goals within the allotted time frame. Lastly, and arguably most importantly, comes the annual review in which a company analyzes how close they were to reaching their goals, learning from possible mistakes and then forming new goals for the next yearly cycle keeping in mind the strengths and weaknesses of the past year.

Method of Planning

While parts of this process may seem somewhat obvious, they are actually not as simple as they seem.

The 12-month cycle is repeatedly stressed, however the first three months or so should be spent in the planning stages, developing objectives and determining the necessary courses of action to take to reach such goals by the end of the 12 months.

Though not necessarily explicitly stating each and every step to take to create a successful business, Hoshin Kanri provides a formulated method of planning to provide some direction capable of keeping your business on track.

Social Media the Gateway for a Business to Get More Clients

For those of us who are slightly more old-fashioned in our ways and hesitant to put ourselves out on the web to gain exposure for our business, actively participating in social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter can seem like a daunting task. Yet in an increasingly digital world, social media, if utilized correctly, can be the gateway to tons of audience exposure for a business seeking more clients. In fact, the infographic below titled “10 Reasons Why Small Businesses Can’t Ignore Social Media” (though I think a more appropriate name would be “10 Reasons Why Small Businesses Shouldn’t Ignore Social Media”) showcases a number of ways as to how social media is more beneficial than problematic.

Social Media and Website

Somewhat a given to social media users, outlets such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social sites not only increase the exposure that a site or business can receive but consequently produces an increase in traffic as well, as confirmed by 76% of interviewed businesses. A benefit that some people may not think about at first is improved search rankings. It was observed that “the more time spent on social media the better became the rankings” for a website, as more keywords were generated and more visits were garnered. Such an occurrence can do wonders for increasing business flow as, undoubtedly, websites on a more prominently viewable location on search engines have a greater chance of reaching new costumers than sites lower down on the list.

Making Your Business Known

It goes without saying that the more you and your business put yourselves out there, the greater the chance of receiving positive rewards with your efforts. Even large companies like Burger King and Red Bull spend billions of dollars marketing on different social media platforms to create fan followings, offer interesting promotions or contests and at the same time branding their names and becoming more and more well known in the process. So don’t let the seemingly daunting world of social media get you down: chances are your business will experience great improvements!

In this day and age, it seems there are endless amounts of technology being introduced to facilitate our lives, bring us closer to our work and never miss a single beat of information. One of the first introductions to the wave of the communication realm directed at everyday users is the “e-mail”. Okay sure, by now all of us (or at least a vast majority of us) know and use email like it’s no big deal, but this infografic by Sample E-mails gives us a look at how the world views and utilizes email as part of their daily lives.

With a reported 57% of users spending half their working day on their email, many people take email security very seriously, not only in protecting their information but also in sifting through the spam mail that consists of 90% of their incoming emails. In fact of the thousands of junk mail we may receive within a year, about 63% of spam regards sex or dating. And interestingly enough, 17% of people change emails every six months, and 30% change it annually. That sure is a lot of new passwords to take care of!

Yet what caught my attention the most is that “80% of consumers find reading marketing emails on their mobile less easy than on a PC”. Now, while this may seem obvious to some people, I think it’s interesting to see how even though so many gadgets exist out there luring us in to a seemingly more organized and technological lifestyle, not always do people easily adapt to these newer methods.

This infographic caught my attention when I read it sometime ago. It is about lessons learned from Stephen King‘s book On Writing. In the beginning of the book, there is a quote from a review from the Library Journal that says “…recommended for anyone who wants to write and everyone who loves to read.” Do you want to know how an author of horror stories can help you?

I found some inspiration in these lessons, not just in how to write posts for this blog but also in how to manage a business. We have very good advice here. Many times we just think of starting something but we never really do it, and we know that if we have passion for what we do, we will never think of it as a job and we will do it with pleasure.

I particularly like number seven: make it unique. Always! Make a unique blog post, but make it unique to your business. You are unique, and you bring your knowledge, your experiences and your vision to everything you create and do. Get inspired, learn and teach, write and read, and most of all have fun and enjoy!

Nowadays, it is very common to find posts and discussions about content creation and curation. We know that “content is king”, and the more we add social media channels to our marketing plans, the more content we need, and it has become harder and harder to find good content to distribute on all our social media channels.

It is a good strategy to think about your blog/website as a “hub” and treat it as the only place where you create content that is really yours and belongs to you, because we don’t really know what is going to happen with all these social media sites and their policies in the future, therefore we don’t know what is going to happen with our content on these platforms.

It’s time to start creating content for your blog and/or website, but I’ve being thinking that if you’ve already had a blog for quite some time, you should have some posts and articles that you could to repurpose and redistribute on social media. I was lucky to find this simple infographic by MarketingQi about Content Repurposing – “Your Ultimate Online Influence Strategy!”

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